A hip-hop guide to evolutionary medicine and the Darwinian roots of disease.

Award-winning rap artist and playwright Baba Brinkman takes a hard-edged look at the roots of disease in The Rap Guide to Medicine, tracing it back to the body’s evolutionary history. The songs feature clever parasites, rebellious cancer cells, diseases of modernity, the evolution of aging, and a sufferer of cystic fibrosis who uses the “gene’s eye view” to come to fight his illness. The premiere performance at the 2015 Evolution and Medicine Conference in Tempe, AZ, received a complete standing ovation from 300 scientists.

The Rap Guide to Medicine was vetted for scientific accuracy by several experts, led by
Randolph M. Nesse, co-author with George C. Williams of the seminal evolutionary medicine
text, Why We Get Sick. Support for this project was provided by the International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health (ISEMPH), the ASU Center for Evolution and Medicine (CEM), the Society for Applied Microbiology (SfAM) and the Perlstein Lab.